Bobby Jack "Bob" Perry, a residential construction magnate in Houston, is not related to Rick Perry by blood, only money. But there has been lots of that. As with the Swift Boaters to whom he donated $4.45 million, Bob Perry ranks as the single largest donor to Rick Perry during the latter's 10 years as governor of Texas, according to official figures tabulated and analyzed by Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit watchdog group in the state capital of Austin.

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The national media overlooked the George Bush Park fire, just as they ignored the link between climate change and the hellish summer Texas experienced, but the fire was big news in Houston. Local TV stations showed trees burning like torches, unleashing orange flames and black smoke.No evacuations were ordered, but guests at nearby hotels were spooked. "The hallways in the hotel here, you can hardly breathe," said hotel guest Shawn Porter. "It's in all the rooms. They're getting filled with smoke." 

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Chances are, nowhere near as long as John Francis did. After a massive oil spill polluted San Francisco Bay in 1972, Francis gave up all motorized transportation. For 22 years, he walked everywhere he went -- including treks across the entire United States and much of South America -- hoping to inspire others to drop out of the petroleum economy.

Soon after he stopped riding in cars, Francis, the son of working-class African-American parents in Philadelphia, also stopped speaking. For 17 years, he communicated only through improvised sign language, notes and his ever-present banjo. The environmental pilgrim says he took his vow of silence as a gift to his community "because, man, I just argued all the time." But it may have been Francis who benefited most of all. For the first time, he found he was able to truly listen to other people and the larger world around him, transforming his approach to both personal communication and environmental activism.

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Political and media elites in Washington are at once horrified and dismissive of Dean's quest. They insist that Democrats would be crazy to pick a raving liberal like Dean as their next party chairman. But as is so often the case, this inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom is based on dubious "facts" and assumptions about how ordinary Americans relate to politics. Dean is exactly the leader Democrats need to become relevant again.

The Florida Democratic chairman's statement to the New York Times reveals just how out of touch the Washington establishment is: "I'm a gun-owning pickup-truck driver and I have a bulldog named Lockjaw," said Scott Maddox. "I am a Southern chairman of a Southern state, and I am perfectly comfortable with Howard Dean as DNC chair."

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The fateful night came on a Sunday. Bee and her family had gone to bed after sharing a simple supper. But shortly after midnight, in the early hours of Dec. 3, 1984, Bee was awakened by the sound of violent coughing. It was coming from the children's room. "They said they felt like they were being choked," Bee later told the online environmental magazine Grist, "and we [adults] felt that way too. One of the children opened the door and a cloud came inside. We all started coughing violently, as if our lungs were on fire."

From out on the street came the sound of shouting. In the light of a street lamp, Bee saw crowds of shadowy figures running past the house. "Run," they yelled. "A warehouse of red chilies is on fire. Run!"

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The U.S. presidential election is widely seen as too close to call, but one thing is clear: If the rest of the world could vote, Bush would lose in a landslide.

The most recent evidence came last week, when major newspapers in 10 countries released the results of a series of coordinated opinion polls. Thousands of people in Japan, Great Britain, Israel, Mexico, Spain, Russia, South Korea, France, Canada and Australia were asked their views about Bush, challenger John Kerry, the war in Iraq and the global role of the United States. By a 2-to-1 margin, foreigners opposed a second term for Bush. Only in two terror-traumatized countries, Israel and Russia, did a majority of respondents favor Bush over Kerry.

Most foreign governments seem to share their citizens' desire for Bush's defeat, even if diplomatic constraints keep them from saying so publicly. "Even off the record, government officials will not tell you this," a spokesman for a major European nation told me in June, "and I am not telling you this now." But his mischievous smile left little doubt about his true feelings.

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"I want the American people to see where the media take politics in this country," Kucinich responded. "We start talking about endorsements, now we're talking about polls, and then we're talking about money. Well, you know, when you do that, you don't have to talk about what's important to the American people." The studio audience roared applause as Kucinich added, "I'm the only one up here on the stage that actually voted against the PATRIOT Act and voted against the [Iraq] war -- the only one on this stage." Whatever his critics believe, it's clear Kucinich doesn't think his is a vanity campaign.

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George W. Bush is now on the verge of making the same mistake. Like Clinton, Reagan and Nixon before him, Bush's problem is that he has lied to the American people, and the question hanging over the future of his presidency is whether he will have to fess up.

Clinton and Reagan did. Reagan salvaged his presidency by giving a nationally televised Oval Office speech admitting that "my heart still tells me we didn't trade arms for hostages, but the facts show otherwise." Clinton avoided removal from office by confessing during a prime-time television speech to an "inappropriate" relationship with Lewinsky (Clinton's apology was so lame and late, however, that he still had to endure the humiliation of impeachment). Consummate politicians, both Reagan and Clinton chose to endure the temporary shame of apology in order to keep their job as the most powerful man on earth.

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EPA ombudsman Robert J. Martin, who functions as the agency's public interest advocate, alleges that Whitman ordered his office reassigned within the EPA bureaucracy and stripped of its independence after he opposed a nuclear-waste cleanup settlement with Citigroup that would limit its liability to a fraction of the cleanup cost.

Martin made the conflict of interest charge against Whitman in a lawsuit filed Jan. 10 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The suit sought a temporary restraining order to prevent the ombudsman's duties and investigative files from being transferred to the EPA's Office of Inspector General, an agency Martin has clashed with in the past and is currently investigating. Through a spokesperson, Whitman denied Martin's charges.

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Gorbachev linked the planet's worsening health to globalization and the growing gap between rich and poor it has produced. But he emphasized, "We cannot just criticize, cannot just blame. We should try to understand what is happening and what we need to do."

The former Soviet leader also spoke at length about Russian President Vladimir Putin, rebutting criticisms that Putin is returning Russia to authoritarianism and crippling the nation's environmental regulations. After the two men met this summer, at Putin's invitation, Gorbachev had praised Putin for restoring "order" in Russia.

In Tuesday's interview with Salon and National Public Radio's "Living on Earth," Gorbachev stood by his comment, asserting that Putin is "in favor of laws and courts being effective, because in the chaos that existed in Russia under Yeltsin ... dishonest people ... appropriated a lot of property."

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As Salon reported June 9, Sierra Pacific has faced especially fierce local criticism of an 884-acre clear-cutting project on the border of Big Trees State Park, where giant sequoia redwood trees were first discovered in the 1850s. Activists have also opposed clear-cutting farther north in the Sierra Nevada, in Yuba Valley and at the Headwaters Reserve on the North Coast, where Judge Quentin Koop ordered Pacific Lumber Company to suspend logging. Koop criticized Pacific Lumber for making misleading statements to government regulators.

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Giant sequoias made news last month when President Clinton named part of the Sequoia National Forest a national monument. The sequoias' cousins, the slightly smaller coastal redwoods, recently got attention too, thanks to the intrepid tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill. Now, Big Trees State Park, where California settlers first discovered giant sequoias in 1852, is threatened by clear-cutting on its borders.

Clear-cutting is a logging practice that involves felling every tree on a given plot of land, scraping the land bare, spraying it with herbicides and replanting it as a tree plantation. Timber industry officials say that clear-cutting makes for healthier, more productive forests. Most environmentalists counter that the higher production comes at great cost to wildlife, habitat and the water supplies humans and animals depend upon.

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On that very same day, thanks to recommendations Gore made as part of his crusade to "reinvent government," the Department of Energy announced that Occidental Petroleum was buying the Elk Hills reserve in California, 47,000 acres of oil-rich, publicly owned land that had been off-limits to commercial development since 1912. President Nixon had tried to open up Elk Hills to private interests in 1973, after the first oil shock. President Reagan tried three separate times to do the same. Each time, Congress blocked the sale. But Al Gore, with President Clinton's help, succeeded.

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Now, transplant those nightmare scenarios to Denver, and put yourself in the mind of Ed McCallum. The year is 1997. McCallum is the Department of Energy's top professional with hands-on responsibility for protecting the nation's vast stores of nuclear weapons-grade materials from theft or sabotage. McCallum has been reviewing the security performance at Rocky Flats, the nuclear site 17 miles northwest of Denver, and he sees the catastrophe of the century waiting to happen, on his watch.

"The workers at that plant, and the citizens of Colorado, are at extremely high risk" of a terrorist assault that could unleash "a little mushroom-shaped cloud" over Denver, McCallum confided in a phone call to a colleague that May. Such a blast would not only kill Denver's million-plus inhabitants, it would claim tens of millions of additional lives as its radioactive plume blew across the Midwest and on to the East Coast.

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The advisory, which began appearing on fluoridated toothpaste in April 1997, by order of the Food and Drug Administration, begins with the familiar command to brush thoroughly at least twice a day. But then it includes special instructions for children ages two to six: "Use only a pea sized amount and supervise child's brushing and rinsing (to minimize swallowing)." Then comes an additional warning to keep the toothpaste "out of the reach of children under 6 years of age," and finally the ominous advice, "In case of accidental ingestion ... contact a Poison Control Center immediately."

What's going on here? Isn't toothpaste supposed to be good for us? Haven't we been told for decades -- by the government, by the American Dental Association, by countless Crest and Colgate television commercials -- that fluoride is essential to fighting cavities? Isn't that why nearly two-thirds of the public water supplies in the United States are fluoridated?

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Some of the most disturbing giveaways concern the environment and public health, issues with such middle-of-the-road electoral appeal that even the scandal-weakened White House has pledged to block the maneuvering. Since most of the favors are attached to spending bills that must pass by this Friday, Oct. 9, in order to keep the government running, the result may be a repeat of the Clinton-Congress stand-off that produced the government shutdown of 1995.

"It's a very clever technique, trying to divert the nation with the bimbo business while they're busy doing the polluters' business," says Philip Clapp, president of National Environmental Trust, a Washington advocacy group. "There's three times as many anti-environmental amendments being pushed this year as in 1995, but the difference is that in 1995 the media was covering the issue, so Republicans backed off for fear of a voter backlash."

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That's what Philip E. Clapp, the president of the National Environmental Trust, called the global warming treaty signed in Kyoto Thursday. His comment is particularly notable since Clapp, one of the most influential environmentalists in Washington, has for months been fiercely accusing the White House of betraying its green rhetoric. He even helped dream up the recent advertisements in New Hampshire showing Vice President Al Gore's book, "Earth In the Balance," with the taunt stamped across the cover, "Withdrawn by Author?"

But let's grant that the treaty obligating the United States and other industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions overall by approximately 5 percent by 2012 is indeed historic. The question is, what kind of history will the treaty make? Will our children look back on it as the beginning of a successful international effort to avoid a world of killer droughts, rising sea levels and mass species extinctions? Or will they condemn it as too little, too late -- a collection of well-meaning but loophole-ridden pledges whose inadequacies were papered over by self-congratulatory statements from politicians like Gore and President Clinton, both of whom will be out of office before the treaty's commitments come due?

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Of course, there was a bit more to the founding of the Beatles than that, especially as regards Paul McCartney. From the afternoon in June 1957 when Lennon and McCartney first met as Liverpool teenagers, Paul -- who could actually tune a guitar and remember all the words of songs -- was always John's musical equal and then some. As the years went by, their friendship deepened and their songwriting partnership blossomed to produce some of the most important and beloved music of the 20th century. They loved and fought with each other like brothers, but remained soul mates to the very end, as even Yoko Ono, Paul's replacement at the center of John's world, recognized. In the nightmarish hours immediately after Lennon's murder in 1980, Ono made but two phone calls: one to John's Aunt Mimi, the woman who had raised him, and one to Paul, the partner who, despite their many public and private spats, was still closer to John than blood.

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China's environmental disaster threatens not only the Chinese people -- who are dying in the hundreds of thousands every year from staggering levels of air and water pollution -- but all humanity. With its gigantic population and booming economy, China can single-handedly guarantee that climate change, ozone depletion and other deadly hazards become a reality for people the world over.

In the back of our minds, Americans may suspect that China is an environmental wasteland -- after all, we know what happened in the Soviet Union. But the truth has yet to be revealed in all its ghastly vividness, not least because of China's restrictions on foreign journalists. I recently spent six weeks traveling unmonitored throughout China, interviewing everyone from senior government officials and scientific experts to unpaid workers and newly prosperous peasants. Everywhere, it seemed, the land had been scalped, the water poisoned, the air made toxic and dark.

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